can a virus email pose as amoazon.co.uk
 

I have an email from "payments-messages@amazon.co.uk" which looks pretty dodgy - ie it has an attachment and the title is "hey Dude ^ ^ its me :P"

Obviously I havent opened it, but how is the virus really coming from Amazon, or is my pc somehow infected so that they know I regularly get emails from amazon.co.uk and so it uses this address to try and trick me??

I thought to most people here this might be too lowly a question to pose in any of the tech boards, but please move if appropriate

Look at the headers.

hmm... I suggest not opening...
1) Amazon wouldn't call you "Dude" , I suppose
2) Anyone could have send that. I, for example, always use president@whitehouse.gov if I have to test some mailserver settings. Anyone could be anybody in pop3 & smtp (= mail) land.
3) it has an atachment
4) if it's a joke, they have to know better

The way mail worms typically work is they "create" email addresses based on existing addresses found on your system and the system of people on your email contact list, or the lists of their contact lists, etc etc.

So if jack@hotmail.com sends an email to jill@lycos.com, and jill has a friend at joan@yahoo.com, even though jack has never emailed joan, he may get an email that comes from an address like joan@hotmail.com, jill@yahoo.com, or even jack@lycos.com.

I've gotten an email "from myself", even. And several emails that are supposed to have been sent from people on my own damn domain.

Never trust the "from" field alone, look at the header and ask yourself if this email looks weird. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it IS a duck.

There is a nasty worm going around here at school that says it is from the computing support team at our school. Really nasty for those who wouldn't catch that it really isn't form academic computing.

The From: Part of an email can be easily faked, I could write emails with "From: Bill.Gates@microsoft.com"

The "recieved" part of the header is the importend part

Can someone explain more in depth how the from part of the email is faked?

faking email is super easy -- i discovered this early in college and enjoyed many days of messing with my friends. here's an easy how to:

http://www.arson-network.com/index.p...al&subargs=219